I dutifully installed 9.0.2012 - no improvement. I even upgraded to 9.0.2013 - still no change.
Since then, I have not received any response from avast! support even after multiple requests for updates. At this point, I am not sure what I can do to help get this problem resolved. Maybe others who are experiencing the IE crash with Automatic configuration scripts enabled should open tickets as well in the hopes that this will get the problem additional priority.
If anyone has ideas about what additional information could be gathered to narrow down the problem, I am willing to do further problem determination. No dump appears to be triggered by the failure. The event log information is not particularly useful. I ran a process trace but could not find the failure, possibly due to incorrect filters.
Thanks, Norbert